Professor Blair Brettmann

Professor Blair Brettmann
Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Materials Science and Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
Abstract

Design for sustainability: pairing materials science with consumer behavior

Over U.S. consumers spent 4.5 trillion dollars on goods while generating 292 million tons of municipal solid waste in 2018 – and trends in both spending and waste generation are increasing. Displacing plastic-based materials with bio-sourced, re-processable or other more sustainable materials may be consistent with green chemistry and engineering design principles but does not truly improve the circular economy if the bio-sourced or re-processable materials travel straight to landfill. Thus, the challenge of designing products for enhanced sustainability must include a focus on both the materials chemistry aspects as well as the choices consumers make at the end of the product lifetime. To address the materials chemistry challenges, we look to expand available plastics with desirable mechanical properties that are recyclable by designing composites with covalent adaptable networks, including ones that incorporate particles. The interplay of the bond exchange rate kinetics and the network relaxation both greatly influence the reprocessability kinetics, showing that in such systems both the physical and chemical dials can be used to tune the system. However, these new materials will only enhance overall product sustainability if consumers return them for recycling. Thus, we develop a circular economy framework that includes a consumer gate – enabling inclusion of the value provided by the consumer’s decision to recycle into an overall model of the cost of manufacturing the product. By tackling the challenge of sustainable consumer goods from both the materials design and end-of-life perspectives, we can increase the impact of polymer research for sustainability.

Blair Brettmann

Blair Brettmann is an Associate Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering at Georgia Tech. She received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin and her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at MIT. Following her Ph.D., Dr. Brettmann was a Senior Research Engineer at Saint-Gobain and a postdoctoral researcher in the Institute for Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. She was the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award in 2021, the ACS PMSE Young Investigator award in 2020 and an IUPAC Young Observer in 2019. Her research focuses on linking molecular to micron scale phenomena to processing and multicomponent complex mixtures to enable rapid and science-driven formulation and product development.